How Exclusionary Zoning Makes Poor Communities Poorer

Restrictive land use policies mean higher housing costs in neighborhoods most in need of affordability. We need policies that promote enough housing for everybody.

OPINION | April 2, 2026 •

Matthew Mleczko, Marquette University

Multifamily housing in San Antonio. Zoning laws are more flexible in the San Antonio region, leading to lower housing costs than those seen in more restrictive areas. (Adobe Stock)

In the north Phoenix neighborhood of Alhambra, where roughly 20 percent of families live in poverty, one condo demonstrates how significantly housing prices have increased. In 2010, at the peak of the subprime mortgage crisis, it was sold for $40,000. A decade later, a real estate investment firm bought it for seven times that value.

With examples like this, it is easy to understand why housing affordability has rocketed to the top of the political agenda. Yet policy proposals from the Trump administration, like 50-year mortgages and banning investors from purchasing single-family homes, miss a more fundamental problem: Our most basic housing policies, codified in zoning and other land use regulations, are designed to make housing less affordable by excluding the kind of housing that families of limited means can afford.

Over the past few years, there has been a growing awareness of the negative consequences of exclusionary zoning and how maintaining tight land use restrictions plays a major role in driving housing shortages and segregation. Yet when exclusionary zoning is called out, it’s usually framed as an issue of blocking access to middle-class or wealthy communities. This depiction is accurate, but it misses a fundamental and urgent point: As the example of Alhambra illustrates, exclusionary zoning likely makes already impoverished communities even less affordable.

Consider the following comparison: The Denver Heights neighborhood in San Antonio is an area with similar levels of poverty to Alhambra. Roughly one in every five families lives in poverty in this rapidly growing metropolitan area, with similar housing pressures as those seen in Phoenix. Yet in the 85015 ZIP code, which encompasses Alhambra, average rents have soared by nearly 60 percent since 2018 while in the comparable 78210 ZIP code of Denver Heights, rents have grown by less than half that amount during the same period. These are two similar neighborhoods, yet renters seem to be struggling more in one than in the other.

Exclusionary zoning is a likely culprit. According to Eviction Lab’s National Zoning and Land Use Database, local governments in the Phoenix metro area have zoning codes that are more restrictive than the national averages. This is not the case in the San Antonio metro area, where, in general, the laws that regulate what can be built are more flexible. For instance, suburban Phoenix municipalities like Queen Creek generally mandate large lot sizes and restrict apartments, a dynamic called out by Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego. Contrast this with cities in the San Antonio metro area like Alamo Heights, which permits a non-trivial share of multifamily housing and has minimum required lot sizes that top out at 8,400 square feet, less than a fifth of an acre.

My recently published research in the journal Demography demonstrates that, because of exclusionary housing, those living in poor neighborhoods are more likely to face higher costs than those in similar neighborhoods in less restrictive areas. In the case of Phoenix, for example, local housing policies mean higher average rents, higher shares of rent burden and higher housing prices relative to less restrictive areas like San Antonio, findings that have been replicated elsewhere. Importantly, these trends hold true in other highly segregated metro areas like Milwaukee and Detroit, demonstrating that exclusionary zoning is also an important problem outside of fast-growing regions.

Nationally, the most exclusionary policies correspond to an average of approximately $600 more in rent each year in poor neighborhoods. These policies also correspond to far fewer low-cost units across metro areas, such as an estimated 137,000 low-cost apartments that the New York City metro area has lost over the past two decades.

Importantly, these trends don’t respect local boundaries: People living in poor neighborhoods bear the brunt of zoning laws in nearby communities where they have no representation. A wealthy jurisdiction a few miles away might impose strict regulations that working-class families in other jurisdictions end up paying for.

Solving this problem is an imperative for fair and affordable housing and requires the empowerment of regional and state governments to create and enforce policies that promote enough housing for everybody in a given region.

This kind of reform may seem like a daunting political task, but real success in New Jersey, thanks to the state’s recently strengthened law requiring every municipality to provide its “fair share” of affordable housing, demonstrates that positive change is possible. At the federal level, the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, despite stopping short of addressing issues of local control, represents another positive sign by providing financial incentives to local governments for meaningful zoning and land use reform.

At their core, our zoning laws are fundamentally about the kind of housing you and I allow for each other. From that perspective, if we want more affordable housing, the first step among many others is to permit it in the first place. The longer we wait to do this, the more those living in poor neighborhoods will pay for our delay.

Matthew Mleczko is an assistant professor in the Marquette University Department of Political Science and an affiliated researcher at Princeton University’s Eviction Lab.

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